This ever-present incentive to widen the market carries with it a direct consequence. A market is a commercial area characterized by a prevalent equality of prices. Phenomenal development in this respect is characteristic of the United States. For many commodities the market is coextensive with the national domain. It is the chosen function of transportation agents, by rail and water, to ensure this result; to preserve an equality of prices, despite the variety of producing and consuming conditions. The railway is the agent by which the market is thus widened and rivalries are thus equalized. In railway parlance this is what is known as "keeping everyone in business." The following quotation from the Senate Committee Hearings of 1905 adequately describes the process: "I am interested in the erection of a mill that has just been completed, and sometime since I was figuring on the question of a smokestack. I wanted to have that stack built out of brick that is burned in New Jersey, and that is several hundred miles away. It is a long way to ship freight from New Jersey to North Carolina. A quotation was made me by the stack builder, whose office is in New York, and I remarked to him, 'That price is prohibitive; I cannot pay that price for that stack.' He said, 'That is the best I can do; but if you will tell me what you can afford to pay for that stack, in competition with home-burned brick, I will see what I can do with the railway people.' He said, 'All right; I will take it up with the railway people.' His quotation included the delivery of the brick and the erection of the stack at my plant. It would require something like about fifty carloads of brick to build that stack. Within a week he had his price revised, and gave me a satisfactory quotation and took my contract for the stack. Of course he had to get a special rate from the railway people, because there is no regular tariff on brick from New Jersey to North Carolina." In this instance the railways actually created this new business by so adjusting the margin between the minimum cost of making brick in New York and in North Carolina, as to make it possible for the traffic to move. The special rate here mentioned, however, should be carefully distinguished from a secret rebate offered to one contractor as against another in the same place. This commodity rate, while special to meet a particular contingency, was open to any other shipper similarly circumstanced. The student cannot too carefully discriminate between these two sorts of special rates. They are constantly confused in the public mind. The effect of these open commodity rates, is not to create difference of opportunity between individuals, but to generalize economic conditions and equalize prices throughout wide areas.